CalSTRS fix portends years of budget strife

The long-overdue decision of Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature to shore up the badly underfunded California State Teachers’ Retirement System has all sorts of painful long-term budget ramifications — and not just for schools.

The governor proposes a fix in which contributions from school districts (which are state-funded) and the state and, to a lesser extent, from teachers would gradually be ramped up through 2020, when CalSTRS would get an additional $5 billion a year. Ninety percent of that amount — $4.5 billion — would come from the state general fund. That’s equivalent to about 4 percent of the 2014-15 budget proposed by Brown.

But will that $4.5 billion be taken out of existing education funds? Or other state programs?

Powerful teachers unions are certain to say it should be other state programs — the UC and CSU systems, welfare agencies, prisons, you name it.

Advocates for these programs already have intense fights about relatively small sums. When it comes to a fight over $4.5 billion, we’re likely to see a perpetual version of what philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a “war of all against all.”

There is a much less painful way out of this coming crunch: to have a booming economy drive revenue far higher. Unfortunately, the governor and a majority of lawmakers seem completely comfortable with a status quo in which San Francisco and tech centers do well while the rest of the state remains mired in a de facto recession. Too bad they don’t appreciate the insight of that long-ago Democratic president who liked to say “a rising tide lifts all boats.”